It is becoming increasingly popular to send photographs, scanned documents, slide shows, PDF documents and other types of attachments in email messages. Each attachment is provided with a filename and is linked to an email message in a manner that is well known in the art. Often, a single email message may contain multiple attachments.
On portable electronic devices, there is generally a delay between a request to view an attachment by a user and display of the attachment on the display screen of the device. The primary cause of the delay is server processing time, however, network speed is also a contributing factor. The delay can often exceed 20-30 seconds. A shorter waiting period between requesting and viewing an attachment on a portable electronic device is therefore desirable.